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At Ramayan Shah’s Hotel

Deborah Baker

Calcutta: Two Years in the City by Amit Chaudhuri
Union, 307 pp, £16.99, February 2013, ISBN 978 1 908526 17 5

In January 1990 I moved from New York to Calcutta to get married. Having never been to India, I came equipped with V.S. Naipaul’s India: A Wounded Civilisation and Geoffrey Moorhouse’s rather more upbeat and engaging Calcutta. My mother, arriving for the wedding, looked around and seemed to grasp things rather more directly. ‘You must really love him,’ she said.

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